Education
Stronger academia-industry ties urged The proper relationship between industry and higher education is one of "synergistic symbiosis," according to Dr. Thomas L. Martin Jr., president of Illinois Institute of Technology. In an address to the Western Society of Engineers last week in Chicago, Martin asserted that "our national strength, whether economic, military, or moral, is determined by the quality of professional education." Thus, Martin says, business, industry, government, and labor all exist in symbiotic relationships with advanced professional education. Symbiosis usually implies an association advantageous to one or both organisms and harmless to neither. But a broad definition also includes the concept of parasitism. If the benefits of symbiosis are to be realized, the relationship must not be parasitic. Rather, it should be positively synergistic; that is, two agents working together to achieve greater effects than they could achieve separately. "Strong schools can produce important effects upon the region surrounding," Martin observes, citing as examples the high-technology industrial
complexes that have grown up in the San Francisco Bay and Boston areas, in large part nourished by the excellent schools in those areas. Also, he notes, a study made several years ago in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area showed that, two years after employment, each engineer in a company generated a local income of $235,000 to $250,000 annually. Along these lines, Martin notes that the output of baccalaureate engineers in the U.S. has been declining since 1969. It is perhaps more than coincidence, he believes, that the same period has seen a parallel slide in the national industrial economy. Steps toward achieving synergistic symbiosis between schools and businesses include undergraduate and graduate programs, faculty consulting for industry, and the use of adjunct professors from industry. But these don't go far enough, Martin says. For example, schools should place more reliance on "visiting industrial professors." These "VIP's" should be selected and ranked exactly like the regular faculty. They should vote on faculty matters, serve on committees, direct doctoral students, do research, and
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C&EN Feb. 24, 1975
Martin: synergistic symbiosis teach. In short, they would be treated as regular faculty members, except that they would serve part-time. "This concept of the visiting industrial professor goes far beyond the simple notion of an adjunct professor or lecturer," Martin comments, adding that the VIP's would build many interactive bridges at many levels. He expects that the university would make only nominal payments to the visiting industrial professors and that their companies would release them from regular working hours to do their university work. "In this way, industry would be providing a substantial subsidy to the educational process." What else can the companies do? Provide more support to relevant research projects in the schools, Martin says, arguing that federal support of such projects "has given the government a dominant voice in the affairs of higher education." Such support is not charity, nor is it philanthropy. Properly conceived and carried out, "it is a fair trade of faculty and graduate student expertise at low cost and on subjects relevant to the sponsor." Projects must justify themselves to the sponsoring companies, Martin adds; else they would be charity. And they must justify themselves academically, otherwise they would not contribute to the educational process. Industry also should pay the full cost of education provided to its employees by private schools. The cost of such education is usually about twice the regular tuition charged by private schools, according to Martin. Thus, in most cases education for industrial employees is subsidized by the school from other resources that can ill afford the penalty. "Business and industry cannot continue this parasitic relationship and expect to achieve any real synergism," Martin says. Finally, unrestricted gifts of money to selected schools can help achieve both institutional and corporate goals. Such gifts, Martin says, can spark "incredible changes" that yield benefits for the entire community. D
